The greens party

Once the whitest of white, golf has become the very essence of cool

by David Andrew Stoler

Turn on MTV right now. Okay, now turn it to BET. On one of the two, at this instant, is the new hit video for the new hit single on rap's latest smash album: "Mo Money Mo Problems," the latest single from deceased rapper Notorious B.I.G. One problem, says B.I.G., as if in chilling retrospect, is that when you get money and success you always have to watch your back, because somebody wants to take them from you, and they'll do whatever it takes to do that.

But this isn't about the death of B.I.G. or rap's over-hyped rivalries. This is about something far less intense, far less serious. This is about the B.I.G.'s trademark -- the cap on his head. It's a golf cap.

This is also about the video itself. It features rap's current favorite heavyweight, Sean "Puffy" Combs, aka Puff Daddy. The video begins with Puffy, sporting a Lacoste-type golf shirt and full golfer gear, sinking the winning putt of a golf tournament before a huge crowd. Golf, at this very moment, is the sport to play and wear. Rappers, rockers, and slackers alike, as well as pro-basketball, baseball, and hockey players, are all heading out to play the ultimate country club sport, rallying in both conversation and promotion, about the merits of carrying clubs on tour and taking any free time to play a quick 18. And in every urban environment from the Bronx to Fox Point, kids are sporting golf visors and polo shirts.

As recently as the mid-1980s mainstream America (for whom, note, the most popular recreational sport is bowling) looked at golf as a sport practiced behind the sanctified walls of super-exclusive country clubs by rich, white men of leisure -- and maybe sometimes their rich, white wives of leisure would play, too, but only with other wives.

Suddenly, though, it's down to play golf. And despite what most media would have you believe, it has little to do with Nike or their new-found wunderkind. No, golf has been the sport of the young and hip for a bit longer than Tigermania, however just the lauds for his game might be.

It's got to be going on 10 years since ill-singing Biz Markie followed up "You Got What I Need" with "It's Spring Again," whose video featured the Biz in golf beret and knickers madcapping it around the country club. The Beastie Boys carried clubs on Lollapalooza '93, and Dinosaur Jr.'s J. Mascis used a golf CD-ROM to promote 1994's Without a Sound.

From these roots golf has risen through the MTV mainstream, with bubble-gummers like Collective Soul and Hootie angling for their piece of hipster pie by holding celeb golf tournaments for charity. And all this before it was legal for golf's new poster child to drive anything but a golf ball.

In an effort to find out just how golf became New School, as well as just what its appeal is, three friends of varying golf skills and I of zero golf skills crashed the links in that mecca of hipdom, Seekonk, Massachusetts.

A brief interlude establishing cast and mise-en-scene as backdrop for the day's adventures proceeding directly to Hole #1

It is 4:30 Sunday afternoon at the Firefly Golf Course in Seekonk. Firefly is a small course -- par is 60 shots, as opposed to the standard 72 -- good for beginners like me. This should make me feel welcome, but for some reason it doesn't. Instead, approaching the pro shop and seeing all of the people lounging about in golf whites (and I do mean whites: everyone I see is) I feel uncomfortable at a gut level.

It is not as if my own group is particularly diverse. Aside from my own Semitic background, in fact, we're pretty much as pasteurized as it comes. Here's our rundown:

Chris C., 25, works the counter of an indie record store. His only golf experience is a lone father-son tournament when he was 12, of which he offers no further details;

Stack, 22, works promotions for the local alt. rock radio station. He's the most experience-heavy in our group -- he grew up a hard-core New Jersey suburbanite with all of the perks, including the country-club membership;

Chris N., 23, is a recent Rhode Island School of Design grad. He has played a few times, mostly with his pop when Chris was a tyke growing up in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

My own experience on the course is basically nil. That is, my own experience playing golf -- I actually grew up right next to the third tee of the muni course in my home town, but the only thing I ever used it for were high-school parties and the occasional make-out spot.

Cooler full of beer in hand, we pay $16 a pop at Firefly and encounter two of what will turn out to be many obstacles. The first is that, eyeing our outfits and our cooler, the guy working the counter refuses to rent us carts. "It's too late in the day," he st-stammers. "I'll never get them back before closing time." The excuse rings funny, but ok, fine.

The second thing is that the course is packed. It's a gorgeous Sunday, the first cool day in a couple of scorching weeks, and Tiger's already out of contention in the big golf tournament on TV, so everybody's here. Because of the crowd, we'll have to wait some time to tee off, and there are a lot of people congregated around the first tee. This means that a lot of people will be watching us, and although I have no doubt that they will be awed and astonished by my mega-man first-ever drive, I must admit the gallery has me jumpy.

During our wait, I introduce myself to the people behind us -- two women, maybe in their 50s, named Delores (Dee) and Patricia (Pat). Dee is dressed in a bright-pink golf ensemble that starts with the mandatory visor, heads to a polo shirt and knee-length shorts, and finally ends in saddle shoes (mercifully, not pink) with golf spikes. Pat prefers her powder-blue plaid number -- a body-length jumpsuit of unspecified material. With Pat and Dee is a 13-year-old boy named Josh, who is related to one or both of the women in a way that is unclear to me. All three are Seekonk natives.

Pat tells me that we will be waiting in line a lot together today, probably at each tee, and that, consequently, we will have a good chance to get to know each other. She says this eyeing our cooler. Finally, after about 40 minutes, it's my turn to tee off.

I am Tiger Woods. I stare with Zen-master focus at the white, dimpled ball sitting aloft the wooden tee, draw the club back, then swing downward with all the strength I can muster, my hips whipping tsunami-like force through my arms and launching the club toward the unsuspecting ball.

The joke here, of course, would be that I miss -- a complete and total whiff that sends snickers through the small crowd awaiting their own tee turns. But such is not the case. I do indeed hit the ball, and hit it solidly: the sound of the club cutting the air punctuated by a ringing "ping" as it strikes the ball which, in turn, speeds -- some would say "careens" -- at an almost 90-degree angle to my right, toward and over the practice green to be leapt by no fewer than three yelping/scowling retirees. Finally it plunges irretrievably into the small strip of trees and brush that demarcate well well out of bounds.

Dee finds it appropriate at this point to help herself to one of the beers from our cooler.

Golf's blessed synergy: be like Mike and gangster status and appropriation

It was back around 1983 when golf's stars started to align. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, one of the state university's young, talented basketball players met one of its young, talented golf players. Michael Jordan and Davis Love III became fast friends, and golf's fortunes turned. Jordan showed an interest in golf, Davis supported him, and Jordan learned to love it.

Jordan also became the most famous and emulated person on the planet. Whatever Mike wore, everyone wore; whatever Mike drank, everyone drank; and whatever Mike did, everyone did -- and that included playing golf.

Following Jordan's lead, "the more athletic players started to take it up," says Phil Fecteau, head teaching pro at Firefly. "They have a huge influence -- they make it normal."

As basketball and baseball players all started talking about fixing their golf swing during their off-season, people started paying more and more attention to golf. Joe Sprague Jr., tournament director for the Rhode Island Golf Association, says that golf's governing body, the US Golf Association, went after its new audience with inner-city outreaches and grass-roots programs "in an effort to get inner-city and non-traditional groups who might not be inclined to play out onto the course." By "non-traditional" he means the poor and minorities.

Golf was well on its way to popularity, but it took the simultaneous and continued evolution of something entirely different to make it not only popular, but hip, too. At about the same time M.J. was making his name in hoop, rap was shifting into its third stage of prominence. Paralleling rock 'n' roll's development in the beginning of this century, rap had been in its folk stage five or six years prior to this, mutating and growing at the grass-roots level of parties and extreme urban hip. It's like the Sugar Hill Gang is to rap what Robert Johnson is to rock.

Later, in the mid- to late-'80s, rap hit the pop-culture stage, drawing on its roots and combining them with modern pop inclinations. Rappers became a force in music, fashion, everything -- pop icons with hit singles who were economic forces. So maybe L.L. Cool J and the Fresh Prince are like the Beatles; N.W.A like the Rolling Stones.

So rappers got huge, made money, and started to sing about it and the respect that they deserved because they had money and success. Gangster rap, too, got big, and rappers began to appropriate 1920s American gangster style -- pinstriped suits, fedora hats. Gangsters, after all, appropriated all the symbols of money -- boats and planes and mansions and cigars, things that had been exclusively white.

Throughout history golf, of course, has been the whiteyest of the white, so rappers appropriated this as well. L.L. started to wear golf caps and shirts. The Biz shot a video on the golf course. This was around 1990. New-school golf was born.

Hole #3

Okay, golf is hard. Damn hard. Hole #3 is tiny -- maybe 130 yards -- but the key here is that it crosses, from tee to green, a road. Next to the road is the Firefly parking lot, and there are screens set up on the side of the third tee to keep an errant tee shot from doing damage to our parked cars. It doesn't work.

This time, though, the embarrassment is not mine. Instead, Chris C. takes a seven-iron at our favorite near-90-degree angle to the right -- the ball barely misses the edge of the screen and goes flying into the parking lot. It doesn't hit the first or second car in, but keeps going right until it finds, at near full speed, the back of a red mini-van.

"I didn't see anything," says Pat from behind us, and we move on.

Hipsters: your standard white reappropriation

Enter the classic pattern in a long history of reappropriation. As they have at least since suburban white boys from Jersey crossed the Hudson to hit up the Harlem jazz joints in the '40s and '50s, styles right now come from urbanity, and by this I generally mean urban blacks.

Trends tend to start with the black pop icons, become hip, then move throughout the city, where the white urban hip quickly pick up on them. Hipness is in the air, and that's when bands like the Beastie Boys, no small co-opters themselves, start to lead another rampart, bringing golf bags on tour and talking to white media about it, etc., etc., ad infinitum -- everyone gets in on the game. From suburb to shining suburb, golf has been reappropriated, and all of America's ears are perked. Enter Tiger Woods.

Woods, though, is just the cherry on top of the whole rap/pro-athlete phenomenon. Tiger is a minority star in a sport just waiting for one. He would not be nearly as popular in any other age.

It's just that, because of rap and M.J., people, in general, were there already, attentions tuned. Now Tiger appeals to a huge new audience of both minorities and white people -- not just hip but mainstream. Golf has moved from elitist, white, and rich, to black, rich, and hip, to all those people combined plus all the white people who just want to play golf anyway but now can do so and appear to be hip, i.e., Collective Soul.

Hole #12

An open letter to Mr. Herb Chambers, new-car dealership magnate:

Mr. Chambers, I'm sure you are aware of the close proximity to the 12th hole of the Firefly golf course with which your Route 44 Seekonk, Massachusetts, Honda dealership lies. You may, however, not be aware of some of the peril this proximity places your vehicles in, particularly those stationed directly behind the 12th green.

Be advised, Mr. Chambers, that golf is an entirely frustrating game and that this frustration can manifest itself in some, well, extreme ways, as was demonstrated by my associate, Mr. C., this past Sunday.

Mr. C., not known for his benevolent temper, had a bit of a tantrum on the 12th hole after missing an easy putt. Do not doubt, Mr. Chambers, that this missed putt was one in a long string of poor playing that resulted in, I'm sorry to say, a rather violent display of frustration by Mr. C. After a cacophonous cry that included expletives unworthy of specific mention, Mr. C. tore across the green and directly toward your new car lot, club in hand.

After hacking away with much vehemence at the tall weeds separating your property from that of Firefly, he made a bee-line for a forest-green Honda Accord. I'm afraid of what might have happened, Mr. Chambers, to that innocent automobile if Mr. C. had not been restrained by me and my fellow compatriots.

In conclusion, you might consider putting up a fence or some sort of barricade to prevent future incident.

With the utmost sincerity,

David A. Stoler, Esq.

An old fart's guide to a clash with the New School

And so golf has come to this present magical moment, a time when all the forces that govern popularity are aligned, in just the right way, to make golf the opposite of what it was a short 15 years ago -- the very essence of cool. The young and the hip are flocking to courses, paying fat green fees, and duffing about like, well, the young hip do -- much to the chagrin of many in golf's old school.

When asked to characterize the new wave of golfers, head pro Fecteau's voice becomes audibly tense. "It's being looked at as a sport where people can yell, drink beer, smoke cigars," he says. "That's not golf." A group of oldsters surrounding Fecteau back him up, muttering about vandalized greens and irreverent newcomers.

Return again to the "Mo Money Mo Problems" video. The person that Puffy beats with his winning putt is named "Fuzzy Badfeet," an obvious reference to golf pro Fuzzy Zoeller, who has been hit hard by criticism for his blatantly racist "jokes" about Tiger's celebrating his monumental Master's victory by eating collard greens, fried chicken, and watermelon.

The video also shows the clash from the other side. Badfeet is the old-school golfer stereotyped. He is wearing ugly, pitiful plaids, has obviously fake hair. All of the classic prejudices against white golfers as lame are reenforced.

So both sides feed off of each other. New-school golfers sense old-school golfers' unwelcoming, aggressive stares and react accordingly by claiming golf with aggression -- and perhaps, in doing so, justify those stares. Old-school golfers sense new schoolers' distaste for the old school's past elitism and get defensive -- and perhaps, in doing so, justify that distaste.

Hole #16 -- 18 and a quick departure

Hole #16 is long for a par-3, about 200 yards. I go driver and, given both the lake on my right and my penchant for hitting it inexplicably in that direction, I aim way left. And I hit it well. Mmn-mmn, that's nice, making that whipping sound with my swing that the good guys make. The ball appreciates it, too, going to the left of the fairway, then, as my patented slice takes over, at a smooth arc to the right. Finally it comes to rest just right of center, about four yards from the green.

Chipping I have no problem with -- I hit a nice looper that lands 10 feet around the other side of the cup, leaving me with my first-ever par putt. Standing over the ball, eyeing the slight break left, I feel all the weight of every golf championship ever won by a stroke on my shoulders. Take a breath, pull back, strike the ball, follow through . . . and the ball falls with that glorious clickety-click of plastic on tin. I give a whoop and pump my arms, adrenaline kicking into overdrive. I can see Dee at the tee of this hole bowing in a "we're not worthy." Oh it feels good.

On hole #18, I score a four-over-par seven, matching in sweet symmetry the seven that I got on the first hole, for a net improvement of nil. Little Josh, who continued to chuckle at every poor shot he saw me hit, beats me up pretty bad, as the final score goes, although I'm pretty sure I could take him in a bar fight.

I think that I would play again, although I'm not exactly sure why -- the discomfort I felt in the beginning of the day didn't much go away. I understand, certainly, how my friends and I fit in the whole scheme, too. We are, after all, those neo-hipsters -- none of us particularly poor, none of us so obviously ethnic.

I do remember, though, and lay claim to, some of the discreet (and not-so-discreet) prejudices of my youth, and perhaps they, at their heart, explain the discomfort that stayed with me throughout the day. As I said, I grew up right next to my city's muni course, but didn't use it. One of the reasons I didn't use it was because none of my friends did. It wasn't that none of my friends played golf. Some of them were, in fact, quite good.

But the ones who did play golf didn't play at the muni course -- they played at what they called "the club," the city's private country club. My family didn't belong to the club. Instead, we spent our summers at the big muni pool, and on the public courts. When I asked my mother why we didn't belong, she said simply, "They do not want us there." What she meant was, "They do not want us Jews there."

From that time on I have felt uncomfortable -- unwanted and even unworthy -- in the company of country clubbers, or anywhere that seems to be their stomping grounds. I may be a bit paranoid, and I am certainly and understandably defensive. I note snubs, notice them, and feel them acutely.

So I was uncomfortable at the golf course, noticed the old-school golfers looking at me and my friends dressed in our basketball jerseys and carrying our cheap clubs, noticed the people three groups behind us zipping about on the carts we'd been denied. I'm not sure my friends cared, or even noticed. But I did, and I understand from it why the golf world may not be the most welcoming place, despite its best efforts. The fact is I saw not one non-white person there -- not one -- and that can be a tough place to be, certainly a tough place to feel comfortable.

The game itself is appealing, although, jeez, I stink at it. Chris C. was right there with me, though. At one point, out of frustration, he even teed off with a wooden Louisville Slugger. It was his best drive of the day, in the air and straight as an arrow. Also, walking through the course with its fresh-cut grass, experiencing the peacefulness in between Chris's rants, and drinking beers while sporting with some of my friends was indeed enjoyable.

What's more, Dee and Pat invited me to their mahjongg game, every other Wednesday night at six. And I think I might take "the girls" up on it. My Wednesdays are generally pretty free. Besides, who knows what urban chic will make hip next -- I've heard Brooklyn's pretty down with the mahjongg ladies. Hey, I may be at the forefront of the next cool sport. And can't you just see the Puff Daddy slappin' down a few tiles in his next vid., a pack of 60-year-old Jewish babushkas dressed in black and gold rootin' him on?